Police Force Privatization And Internet Security

Hi, I'm Jack Herrington. I'm a senior software developer at Fortify. I'll be blogging here to give a developers perspective on security, as well as to bring some light to product features, and maybe throw in a relevant article or two.

To start this off I bring you a piece from Marketplace. They had an interesting story yesterday on the privatization of police forces. The software security relevant element is here:

That's right. In other words, up to now, we talked about the lower-level security that private security guards enter into. Now, we have more sophisticated crime, like identity theft, like Internet crime. The police doesn't deal with it anymore at all. So, private security forces got into it, but it's further. A lot of those investigations require high caliber professionals -- accountants, IT people, lawyers, etc. -- that the police have difficulty recruiting, because of limited budget. And it can never pay the high salary that the private sector does.

Nothing too surprising, but it is interesting to see the acknowledged potential for private IT security and the lack of resources in the public sector to handle IT issues. And of course it's nice to hear about high salaries in the security space.